Paul Strauss

I have been a computer programmer for over 35 years, and that is all I've done for that entire time. Since I began my career as a programmer, I never really wanted to do anything else. If programming wasn't my profession, it would certainly be my hobby. I have devoted all of my working hours, energy, and education toward increasing my skills as a programmer. Among my peers, I am considered something of a guru, so it appears that my efforts have paid off. In an unsolicited comment, another senior MS Access developer that I once worked with said this about my programming skills:

"Very impressive work. I like and enjoy trying to understand your work and I learn so much from doing that."

A few years ago, I decided I would be happier working for myself as an independent computer programmer, sometimes called a computer consultant. The appellation "computer consultant", as it applies to me, is just a fancy name for a computer programmer who has struck out on his own. While being independent has its own set of problems and disadvantages, I very much prefer going out and finding work for myself, and then coming back to my computer and doing that work to my own satisfaction, according to my own high standards of quality and best practice.

The rest of this page is a short biography and resume. I present this information so that you can better understand my knowledge, skills, and experience. I hope this information will instill in you the confidence that I can provide you with the program or web site that you need and that it will be a good program or web site. That is, you will get a good product at a fair price.

I actually started my college career aiming to become a nuclear chemist. Science, and particularly chemistry intrigued me since I was around 11 or 12 years old. I guess I was one of the lucky college freshman in that I knew exactly what I wanted to major in a long time before I even left High School. I spent four years majoring in Chemistry. Along the way, I bumped into computers, got curious about them, and so I took a few extra computer programming and computer science courses.

At first, I had no intention of becoming a programmer, but since I found that I just liked writing programs, I took the courses. I guess I was a rather strange college student because if I found something interesting, I went and took the course. It never occurred to me to ask if I actually needed the course to graduate; I just went where my interests and curiosity took me. So, I now have five extra courses in Chemistry, Math, and Computers under my belt that did nothing toward helping me graduate, but did do a lot toward educating me, which was the reason I was in college in first place. Those extra courses, I think, were certainly not a waste of time or money.

Life is rather unpredictable. I was living outside of Washington, D.C. and found myself in need of a job. There wasn't much need for my chemistry background in that area, but programmers were in demand in that part of the country. So, I got my first job as a programmer in 1975 with the Naval Research Laboratories. It was a stroke of incredible luck because it was a fantastic place to work. I got to rub shoulders with some well-known computer scientists, I worked with quite a few talented and skilled programmers who began teaching me the craft, and I even was exposed to the Internet in its earliest days, when it was still called the Arpanet. I very much liked what I was doing and discovered that I also had something of a knack for it. So, I stayed in the field.

In my many years of computer programming experience, I have worked in many different environments: government, research institutions, and private industry. I have written many different kinds of computer programs in quite a few languages.

Besides the Naval Research Laboratories, I've worked at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) where my programs helped to keep some satellites in the sky. I worked at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratories doing software having to do with missiles fired from submarines. I also worked for the United States Postal Service where my programs helped to sort the mail and plan mail carrier routes. I help do some analysis of the Hubble Space Telescope to determine some the operating parameters. I've worked at a real estate investment firm doing specialized accounting software to keep track of their highly-leveraged investments. I've also worked on the software that emulates a running nuclear power plant as part of the operator training equipment. These are only some of the notable highlights of my career.

In order to write all of these different kinds of programs, I have had to learn and use quite a few different kinds of computers, ranging from old IBM 370 mainframes, DEC PDP-11 minicomputers, and, of course, PCs.

The languages I have learned to write all of these programs include: Fortran (the only language I learned in school), Cobol, Machine/Assembly Language (for about 5 different computers), PL/1, Basic, and C. Of course, now I am doing a lot of MS Access, which means Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and SQL. For web site work, use HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, and Perl. I extensively use AJAX techniques in order to create web sites that act like desktop applications.

When you retain me to create or enhance your MS Access program or create a web site for you, you can be confident that you are retaining an expert software craftsman whose goal is your satisfaction attained by professional quality workmanship.